Receipt of Delivery is a weekly series featuring Bay Area exhibition mailers selected from the SFMOMA Research Library’s collection of artists’ ephemera.

A series of six evenings held at Crossroads Community (The Farm) and curated by artist Jill Scott and poet Ron Silliman.

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Today has been a day of reflection for me after finding a music video by Gotye featuring the singer Kimbra called Somebody I Used to Know that has been a bit of a crossover pop sensation. It is dream-like, a painting that uses voices and bodies of the singers, and it made me think of the narratives that inhabit the paintings and sculptures that I see while working at SFMOMA. Artwork that I have a privilege of seeing before the morning crowds and sometimes alone at night in dark silence while I turn on/off the media art works. Questions arise: D... More

Dolores Dorantes es poeta.

También a eso debo perderle el miedo: a ver. Veo. Un túnel de luz y veo todo abierto y germinando en todos sus significados. Todos. Un organismo terrorífico. Recuerdo un sueño en medio de la fiebre. Lo que literalmente es estar en el mundo, en el mundo entero. Que el mundo esté dentro de uno y ver que uno es de una extensión y estructura infinitas. Ver. Cómo las cosas se suceden y uno importa como importa una clave o un código para que todo tome forma. Ver que veo quién eres: esa fuente de todo lo apac... More

Dolores Dorantes is a poet.

I ought to lose my fear of this, as well: to see. I see. A tunnel of light, and I see everything open and germinating in every sense of the word. Every. A terrifying organism. I remember a dream in the middle of the fever. What is literally being in the world, in the whole world. That the world is inside oneself and to see that one is an infinite extension and structure. To see. How things happen and one is as important as a key or a code so that everything takes on form. To see that I see who you are: that fountain ... More

Today SFMOMA makes the official announcement about plans for the period we’ll be under construction, beginning in 2013. Instead of relocating to a temporary home while we’re building, the museum “will use this period to experiment with new ideas, engage in dialogue with a range of cultural partners, and create innovative ways for ... More

Fernando Fuentes es performancero, feminista, e investigador autónomo.

Cuando iba a empezar estas líneas recordé una serie de ensayos que escribió en diversas ocasiones y a lo largo de muchos años Martha Rosler pero que todos giraban en torno a la producción, recepción y formas de difundir imágenes fijas o en movimiento. Bueno no sólo reflexionaba sobre la imagen, sino sobre lo que significa ser hacedor de imágenes: las responsabilidades que esto conlleva, los riesgos y los logros, para no usar un lenguaje empresarial pongamos ... More

Fernando Fuentes is a performance artist, feminist, and independent researcher.

When I began writing these lines, I recalled a series of essays written by Martha Rosler, for different occasions and across many years, but which all turned around the production, reception, and forms of disseminating images fixed or moving. Not only was she thinking about the image but also about the meaning of being an image-maker: the responsibilities that this brings with it, the risks and the rewards, and to avoid the language of business, we might say, the ha... More

Maybe it has something to do with turning 29, but it seems that all I want to do lately is talk with older generations of queer artists and political organizers about their lives and work. Last week I met with Lenn Keller, a Bay Area filmmaker and photographer whose practice straddles the worlds of artmaking, political activism, and queerness. I first saw Lenn’s work in 2010 when her exhibition Fierce Sistahs: Art, Activism, and Community of Lesbians of Color in the Bay Area, 1975–2000 was on display at the San Francisco Public Library. Fie... More

Gareth Williams es intelectual y profesor.

A través de estas imágenes nos enfrentamos a tres momentos distintos (1933, 1947 y 1989) que nos presentan tres perspectivas disímiles aunque evocadoramente conectadas en puertas, entradas, salidas, fronteras, umbrales y bordes que dan forma a la experiencia de género de una clase social mexicana moderna:

La primera imagen de Paul Strand nos sitúa en el inicio de la década revolucionaria activada por alzamientos campesinos en contra de las injusticias de una economía colonial que continu... More

Gareth Williams is an intellectual and professor.

Through these images we confront three distinct moments (1933, 1947, and 1989) that present three dissimilar yet hauntingly conjoined perspectives on the gateways, entrances, exits, borders, thresholds, and verges that shape the gendered experience of a modern Mexican social class:

The first image, by Paul Strand, situates us in the wake of a revolutionary decade mobilized by peasant uprisings against the injustices of an ongoing colonial economy and spiritual conquest sustained for a century af... More

Lorena Méndez Barrios es activista feminista y artista visual.

Escribo estas líneas desde el lugar de quién ha trabajado nueve años adentro de una cárcel en la Ciudad de México. Soy feminista y mi trabajo político lo desarrollo a través del afecto. Me he podido sentar junto a presos y presas para pensar en las condiciones económicas del p... More

Lorena Méndez Barrios is a feminist activist and visual artist.

I write these lines from the place where I have worked for nine years in a prison in Mexico City. I am a feminist, and my political work begins from the affective. I have been able to sit next to prisoners, both male and female, in order to think about the economic conditions of our c... More

Almost every artist, writer, and poet I know is broke. But how is that possible? While a handful are doing OK, the vast majority are drowning in student loan debt, and the world just seems indifferent. Unlike people who went to school for other things, they are constantly told that getting their degree was a waste of time and they can never expect to make a living with their work. Worse yet, after absorbing all their student loan money, art schools aren’t helping place graduates in jobs.

But unlike the automotive industry, the financial i... More

Amy Sara Carroll es escritora, profesora, y artista visual. (Amy puso su texto sobre imágenes de Tina Modotti abajo.)

Amy Sara Carroll es profesora de American Culture, Latina/o Studies, y English en la University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. En 2003, ella tradujo y creó un poema visual para El automóvil gris/The Grey Automobile de Claudio Valdés Kuri... More

Amy Sara Carroll is a writer, teacher, and visual artist.  (Amy laid her text over Tina Modotti’s images below.)

Amy Sara Carroll is an assistant professor of American culture, Latina/o studies, and English at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. In 2003 she translated and created a visual poem for Claudio Valdés Kuri’s El automóvil gri... More

As the title of this exhibition promises, cultural confluences prevailed at the Luggage Store Gallery, where Lenore Chinn’s retrospective opened on Friday. Representatives of San Francisco’s multicultural arts/activist communities climbed the narrow staircase to the second-story gallery, where Chinn graciously presided over a carefully ch... More

Heriberto Yépez is a post-Mexican writer.

The most talked about debate in Mexico in recent decades concerning the social function of photography occurred around Daniela Rossell’s series Ricas y famosas (Rich and famous). “The persons photographed — the majority young, blonde women — are not identified in the book but … the majority b... More

Heriberto Yépez es un escritor pos-mexicano.

La polémica más sonada en México en las últimas dos décadas acerca de la función social de la fotografía ocurrió en torno a “Ricas y famosas” de Daniela Rossell. “Los personajes fotografiados —en su mayoría mujeres jóvenes y rubias— no son identificadas en el libro pero… en su... More

The proposal was simple: curate a set of writers to meditate on images from an exhibition. Is anything ever as simple as it seems, especially in times of war? My proposal to the writers — among them political artists, poets, intellectuals — was just as simple: take an image or a set of images and, taking the images as a starting point, write a... More

La propuesta era simple. Organizar a un conjunto de escritores para que reflexionaran sobre las imágenes de una exposición. ¿Que cosa tan sencilla, como parece… sobre todo en tiempos de guerra? Mi propuesta a los escritores, entre ellos artistas políticos, poetas, intelectuales, fue también sencilla: tomar una imagen o un conjunto de im�... More

[Five questions to SFMOMA artists, staff, or guests ... although today I'm posting all seven questions with Tammy Fortin, because I couldn't bring myself to cut a single one. Tammy is a 9-to-5er at SFMOMA as the assistant to the curator of media arts, Rudolf Frieling. She is also a musician and writer. Tomorrow is also her last day at the museum. Miss you already, Tammy!]

Do you collect anything?

I collect a lot of things by accident. I’m a sentimental person. If you gave me a scrap of paper and you wrote a really nice note on it, I woul... More

Maybe it was supposed to be funny or cute when Dutch artist Bart Jansen turned the corpse of his dead cat into a remote-controlled helicopter. Normally I wouldn’t give this a second thought, but today I’ve seen it mentioned in the L.A. Times, the Huffington Post, Yahoo news, the Guardian (U.K.), the Washington Post, Daily Mail, and USA... More